Meet Perry Kurtz

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Perry Kurtz. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Perry, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?
I was always a funny kid. However, my father was kind of abusive. He smacked me around a lot. But one day he was yelling at my little brother who was four when I was 10. He was standing over him yelling at him because he had left the roller skates out. He had threatened, ” Do I have to take off my belt?” I jumped in between and looked at him and said yeah take off your belt it’s smaller than your hands. He left and walked out of the room. At that point something clicked inside of me. That if you make people laugh when they’re angry, they’re no longer angry at you. From then on I just started making people laugh everywhere I went. Very popular throughout school and my life. People kept telling me you should be a comedian. You’re very funny. And I stayed funny.
On April 10th 1973, I was sitting in a bar in Atlantic City drinking double shots of southern comfort chased with a coke no ice. A cowboy trucker with a giant cowboy hat, sat down next to me and said” Damn! A little man like you drinking all that? You think you can drink more?” I responded with, if you’re buying I am. He bought me six more double shots of Southern Comfort. 3/4 of a bottle. Now I’m a little guy, a little under 6 feet tall, OK a lot, And I never turned away from a challenge. I chugged them all and he got up and walked away. I got up and slowly fell over to the floor in slow motion making a whooping sound in my ears. While lying on the floor I heard myself say, I should go meet a woman now. I got up and stumbled out of the bar, tripped on my way across the street multiple times, and finally made it into the dance club.
I tried talking to every woman in there but they couldn’t understand me because I was so drunk. I finally wound up in the corner talking to a girl with really big hair, which was the style back then, who just stared at me but wouldn’t react. I got so upset I stumbled out of the bar, falling many many times. Across the street and went to the dock in front of the Atlantic Ocean, watching the wave splash above my head. I was crying. He wants me, I’m just gonna kill myself. And I stepped off the dock
What I didn’t know was that 20 feet down Was another doc with metal railings around the sides. Knocked myself out. When I woke up I was on my back in a jail cell, with 20 or more guys standing over me looking down at me and laughing. One of them said you’re pretty funny when you’re asleep. Few minutes later my friend came to bail me out. He paid the $1000 charge that I had amassed as I had climbed two 10 foot chain link fences and trespassed on a Coast Guard dock, which was a federal offense. As you are driving home he said that I was a real mess the night before and wondered what the bump was on the back of my head. When I reached back there I felt a bump the size of a baseball which I obviously got when my head hit the railing on the way down. He said I was wandering around the bar and mumbling to myself and he just stood there and laughed. Then he saw me in the corner talking to a barstool, that I thought was a girl with big hair.
At that point I stopped drinking alcohol and have not had a drop since. However my friends had been telling me for years that I should be a comedian. So I took a comedy class in Philadelphia, and started driving back and forth from Philadelphia to New York and working on my material. I began playing at clubs around Philly and in New Jersey, and in 1979 I flew to San Francisco to become being a real comedian in a thriving comedy scene.
When I got there I was working out and was approached by a manager of a nightclub on Broadway in San Francisco. It was a male strip club for women only. And I was going to be the MC, the manager, and possibly a dancer when needed. I was being paid $3000 a week and when Would ask me to strip, I would do a parody of a male stripper where everything that could go wrong did go wrong. That alone gave me another thousand dollars worth of income each week. I stayed there for 4 years and finally quit to pursue comedy full time and started going on the road Within three years I was headlining national clubs across the country. In 1989 the owner of the comedy store Mitzi Shore invited me to be a paid regular at her club, working 7 nights a week, for $1200 per week. At that point I moved down to Los Angeles Went on the road once a month for a week. I started getting more paid work on the road and quit the comedy store after 2000 and three and became a full time road comic.
Since then I have played at every type of possible comedy show, all ages, and all mixes, became a writer for The Tonight Show at Jay Leno, appeared on America’s Got Talent where I got screwed, appeared on the late late show with James Corden which paid rather well for two and a half minutes, got a few national commercials, and continued to work full time making people laugh anywhere I could. As they say, I am the laughter.
To this day, no matter where I go, I have people laughing. And most of the time if they don’t know that I am a comedian, they say you should be a comedian.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I am a comedian for the past 50 years. But to this day, I still make people laugh wherever I go. As I have appeared on numerous TV shows, I get recognized quite frequently. However I do have a side non paying job. I go to karaoke bars, and I get up and I make up entire songs based on what the audience is doing as they are doing it. Most of the time I rap. In fact one time I freestyle wrapped ” My heart will go on” From Titanic. Each time I do it people come up to me and say how do you do that? I tell them it’s just something I developed about 45 years ago while singing with a live band in San Francisco. People were walking by while I was singing the Blues and I just started describing them. From then on it’s totally automatic, and I have absolutely no idea how I do it. I just look around and describe what I see, and people laugh. And that’s what I want.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Comedy is one of the hardest professions in the world. Every audience is different. They morph during your performance. If you are not a big famous star, you must be able to adapt to them, as they will not be adapting to you. My abilities to create songs and comedy on the spot have made it easier for me to work to all types of audiences in all parts of the country. For anyone who wants to become a comedian, I recommend you take your real life stories that people laugh at every time you tell them, and take them on stage. Do this as much as you can to get comfortable being yourself. The more you know who you are, the easier it becomes to write for yourself. I have taught comedy to over 2500 people and I always tell them, again, this is the hardest thing in the world. It takes 1000 shows before you make any money. And even that will not be enough to support you. Do not give up your day job., go out as many nights as you can and do as many shows as you can, and videotape them so you can see what you did that made the audience laugh sometimes it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. But no matter what happens if it’s important to you, never give up.

All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?
When my youngest child was born, 19 years ago, and my wife is at home caring for the three children that I had adopted when we got married, I knew that I could not continue to go on the road and leave her alone raising the children. So I moved into the field of entertaining seniors and convalescents. I developed a very interactive comedy and music show, where I speak directly with them about who they are and what they’ve done with their lives, while motivating them to stay active, talk to each other to keep your brain working, get some sun because they’re all low on vitamin D, and don’t lay around in your room and stare at the boob tube to stop your brain. Once they start talking about their lives, they have a tendency to touch their head, and say, I just remembered something. Then they tell an elaborate story with lots of detail which entertains the rest of the audience. I find out who’s got a birthday, who’s been married the longest, who’s from out of town, where are the vets, anybody have a strange story to tell? Then I pull out my little red guitar as seen on the late Late Show with James Corden, and I make up a song about what they are doing as they are doing it, get them to sing along, sometimes they get up and dance, and then I close the show by playing the lead to the song louie Louie, with my tongue. When I used to go on the road with it, there were no comedians that were willing to follow me. Right now my biggest obstacle is that a form of COVID hit the Los Angeles area in May which was mainly attacking people over 80 years old in their breathing systems and killing them. At that point I lost all my work and have not been able to recover since. Now there is a new COVID and I still have no work for the future. Every day I spend three to four hours on the phone making anywhere from 30 to 60 phone calls to senior locations around the Los Angeles area. Hopefully things will change and I’ll be able to pay my bills.

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n/a Most from TV or clubs

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